Today's post is something I had to research yesterday as I find more and more people omitting a hyphen in words such as co-worker.

How do you write the word?

coworker or co-worker?

In my research, I found a blog that really hits the nail right on the head on how I feel about it. You can read the blog here: http://www.grammarunderground.com/co-worker-vs-coworker.html

The author of the blog, June Casagrande, says: Publishing can’t get its act together on whether to hyphenate co-worker. But there does seem to be a trend toward no hyphen and it couldn’t be uglier to me.

I have always hyphenated the word co-worker. Probably because of my newspaper background where the AP Stylebook still says to hyphenate.

However, in editing fiction, I follow (most of the time) the Chicago Manual of Style. So, guess what? In the 15th edition of CMoS, it was left open and more up to the author to decide. However, in the current 16th edition, they recommend NO hyphen.

Wait, what?

Now it looks like COWorker.

I know sometimes you might think your co-worker is a cow, but they really aren't cows. They are CO-workers.

June also says:

"I don’t normally argue with style guides’ rules. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just referees making calls – many of them just for consistency’s sake. And I don’t consider style issues particularly important – after all, if serial commas were so important, everyone would have agreed on their utility long ago. Yet serial commas are optional, so I’m fine with letting style guides tell me whether or not to use them.

"But coworker is different. It’s ugly, weird and, well, cow-like. Me, I’ll use co-worker every time I have an option, which, if you know how to read between the lines of a style guide, is pretty often."